Non-probabilistic design arguments

Nov 24, 2014

Non-probabilistic design arguments

Uncommon Descent

Biochemist Michael Behe has stated:

“A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed. In the same way biochemistry has opened up the cell to examine what makes it run and we see that it, too, was designed.”

One needs no probabilistic calculation to infer design before a car or cell. Why — as Behe says — “he immediately realizes that it was designed”? Because such dynamic systems show clear hallmarks of organization. Some of them are:

(1) hierarchy of devices and functions (see my previous post); (2) hierarchy of tasks and actions, when the system is in operation; (3) implementation of the control-power paradigm (see here); (4) implementation of the communication paradigm between sub-systems.

In fact chance is simply a brute force of un-correlation. Example, in coin tossing any outcome is unrelated to the previous ones. Since organization eminently implies relations, how can a producer of non relations create it? Not only chance can do nothing to organize, even it destroys organization if it enter into the systems.

The same, necessity (aka natural laws) per se cannot be the cause of organization because they don’t potentially contain it. Natural laws are relatively simple mathematical equations. These equations don’t implicitly contain the specifications of the least organized system, as the simple function y=x^2 doesn’t contain, say, Riemann’s zeta function, which is of a far higher order than the quadratic one.

Neither the couple natural laws + randomness can create organization. In fact natural laws are a processor. If randomness provides garbage in input to it this processor necessarily outputs garbage.